The Best and Worst of Spring 2018

by Daniel DeLorme, Jul 5th 2018

Our team of reviewers are following 27 anime series of the Spring 2018 season and readers are rating each episode as the reviews go up.
So let's have a look at what ANN readers consider the best (and worst) of the season.

Keep in mind that these rankings are based on how people rated individual episodes of the current season, not on the overall quality or popularity of the series.
Only the titles legally streaming in North America and popular enough to be reviewed are being ranked, so the bottom of the list might represent 'watchable' rather than 'bad'.
See the notes for further details.

For the last week we're doing a little something different

With the week of June 24-30, the Spring 2018 season is now over.
But many of the series already ended the previous week, so we're adding an extra "final" week where all the last episodes are ranked against each other.
With this we can see which series ended on a strong note and which ones ended more weakly.
That means the "final ep." column is a repeat of the last episode from Jun 17-23 or Jun 24-30.
And the "prev week change" is the difference in position between the "final ep." column and the penultimate episode.

Episode Rankings for the final episodes

Along the actual ranking for this week's episodes, this graph chronicles the change in position from week to week.
While some series are stable, others swing wildly in the rankings depending on the strength of each episode.
When a series has no episode for a given week, the previous week's episode is used instead as a placeholder.
The first episode of each series is considered as part of the first week, even if it really aired during the second week.
Click on the numbers to highlight a particular series.

ranking change from week to week(episode numbers as labels; clickable)

Series Cumulative Ranking for Spring 2018

Each week's ranking takes into account the scores given to previous weeks' episodes.
Click on the numbers to highlight a particular series.
With the last episode duplicated in the "final ep." column, it means that the votes for the last episode of each series are counted twice, which intentionally gives a boost to series that ended strongly.
This somewhat compensates for the fact that the first episode of each series has more votes, which favors series that started strongly.

So this is it, the final ranking, the winners and losers of the Spring 2018 season.

ranking change from week to week(episode numbers as labels; clickable)

Notes

Disclaimer: the rankings are just an average of opinions, published for entertainment and information purposes.
ANN makes no claims regarding statistical significance.

The rankings are computed using the Schulze method,
with the variation that unrated titles are considered as abstentions instead of lower than the rated titles.
This roughly means that if, out of all people who rated both A and B, 60% preferred A, it will be ranked higher than B.

The rankings indicate relative quality (A is preferred to B), not absolute quality (B is good/bad).
While the titles are ranked from 'best' to 'worst', sometimes the difference between #1 and #10 can be very thin.
So if your favorite is near the bottom of the list, don't take it personally.
It doesn't mean it's a bad show, it just means that ANN readers, on average, have preferred the ones above.

If a series has no episode for a given week, we use the rating data for the previous week's episode in order to compute the weekly ranking.
This is not officially counted as a position in the ranking (it has no impact on the cumulative ranking), but it makes it easier to compare weeks if they each have the same number of series ranked.

It should be noted that long-running series (and sequels) have an advantage in the sense that only people who like the series are still watching it, and they are likely to give each episode a high rating.
But if such a series is going through a low-quality filler arc, the season will get low rankings that are not indicative of the true overall quality of the series.

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